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DISCOURSE Workshop at COLING 2012
W1: Advances in discourse analysis and its computational aspects
Workshop general chair: Eva Hajičová, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: hajicova at ufal.mff.cuni.cz
Brief description of the workshop
The aim of the workshop is twofold:
- to bring together and to spread an up-to-date information on advanced computationally oriented studies in discourse analysis, and
- to provoke a discussion on hot issues in the domain of the study in discourse, especially with respect to modern methodology and to computationally and corpus oriented research and its possible applications. Thus, the workshop may attract a rather broad (and cross-section) audience: those who are just starting their research in the given area will get enough stuff for thought how to proceed, and those who are in an advanced stage of their research will get a stimulating feedback from the floor and the discussion will make it possible for them to sharpen their ideas and plans.
To fulfil the workshop aims specified above, the workshop will attempt to provide a forum free of the conventional shape of unrelated
presentations on the topic.
The programme of the workshop will contain
(i) brief positional papers
given by prominent researchers who have had significant contributions to the field (see the list of invited speakers below), and
(ii) contributions
by workshop participants submitted and accepted (on the basis of a review procedure).
We believe that this procedure will help to concentrate on an intensive interaction and discussion of all the participants of the workshop.
The abstracts of the statements of the invited speakers will be published on this web page before August 31st, 2012.
The invitation to present a position paper (with a privisional topics as given below) has already been accepted by:
Prof. Katheleen McKeown, Columbia University, New York, USA
(What is needed and what can help for people who want to use discourse relations in tasks such as NL generation or text summarization.)
Prof. Kristiina Jokinen, Helsinki University, Finland
(New Information in Wikitalk - story telling for information presentation)
Nianwen (Bert) Xue, Assistant Professor Brandeis University. USA
(Explicit and implicit discourse relations from a cross-lingual perspective – from experience in working on Chinese discourse annotation)
Confirmation of a presentation is still to be received by:
Prof. Aravind Joshi, Pennsylvania University, Philadelphia, USA
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex, Great Britain
Among the issues proposed to be discussed there are
- Intrasentential and intersentential relations: commonalities and differences
- Explicit and implicit relations of coherence of discourse; means of implicit relations.
- What corpora annnotation of discourse relations and related phenomena can reveal?
- Annotation efforts undertaken in languages other than English, and their contribution to advances in Language Technologies and to a greater cross-linguistic understanding of coherence relations, their complexity and their lexicalization.
- Advances in empirically-driven discourse-level methods of language processing (discourse parsing, sense detection) and their impact on theoretical understanding of discourse structure
- Discourse and dialogue, commonalities and differences (e.g. dialogue act standardisation)
- Text segmentation and modelling of coherence in texts, twits, dialogues, monologues etc.
- Structures other than coherence relations that discourse manifests (e.g. layout or “document structure”), or structures specific to particular genres (news report, scientific papers, errata, etc.)